The New General Service List (NGSL) is a list of 2,818 words (
lemmas
Lemma may refer to:
Language and linguistics
* Lemma (morphology), the canonical, dictionary or citation form of a word
* Lemma (psycholinguistics), a mental abstraction of a word about to be uttered
Science and mathematics
* Lemma (botany), ...
) claimed to be the core vocabulary of the
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...
published by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips in March 2013.
The words in the NGSL represent the most important high frequency words of the English language for second language learners of English and is a major update of Michael West's 1953
GSL.
Although there are more than 600,000 word families in the English language, the 2,800 words in the NGSL give more than 90% coverage for learners when trying to read most general texts of English.
The main goals of the NGSL project were to (1) modernize and greatly increase the size of the corpus used by, and to (2) create a list of words that provided a higher degree of coverage with fewer words than, the original GSL.
The 273-million-word subsection of the more than two-billion-word
Cambridge English Corpus is about 100 times larger than the 2.5 million word corpus developed in the 1930s for the original GSL, and the approximately 2,800 words in the NGSL gives about 6% more coverage than the GSL (90% vs 84%) when both lists are
lemmatized.
Copies of the NGSL in various forms (by headword, lemmatized, with definitions), published articles about the list and links to analytical tools and materials that use the NGSL are all available from the NGSL website.
See also
*
General Service List
The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was E ...
(GSL) a list of roughly 2000 words published by
Michael West
*
Swadesh list
The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatednes ...
*
Français fondamental
''Français fondamental'' (French for ''Fundamental French'') is a list of words and grammatical concepts, devised in the beginning of the 1950s for teaching foreigners and residents of the French Union, France's colonial empire. A series of inves ...
*
Vocabolario di base ( in italian : Basic italian )
References
Further reading
*
External links
*
{{Frequency list
Lists of English words